It's hard to have an effective debate without level setting.

A basic understanding of how we're influenced. Books that come to mind are:Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, and The Design of Everyday Things.

After accepting we can be influenced, then we need to understand real world examples of nefarious influence through social media and adtech. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on the 2016 election comes to mind.

So if we can be influenced, and if there's evidence our elections have been influenced; then we need to question if China is a threat, through Tik Tok.

My issue with TikTok is its a walled garden.

I can search Google, or Alphabet services like YouTube, anyonymously or with a reasonable degree of privacy. I cant do that on TikTok, because it basically only works logged into the app, and all the content is within TikTok.

I guess you could account swap on TikTok to keep the "interests" separate, but I don't really trust that since you are still bound to the app.

But that is not unique to TikTok. Discord and Facebook suffer from the same issue.

Am I holding it wrong? Watching TikTok videos via links people have sent me, or that have come up via Google search (just add TikTok to your search), in an incognito window of Chrome, seems to work just fine.

No I think I am holding it wrong... maybe it is getting blocked or broken by a blocker.

Google definitely collects more data, but TikTok’s data goes directly to China Government. Does same happen with Google? Maybe. However, in case of both of them doing that, from my perspective unfriendly/enemy country collecting that data is worse .

Is your data potentially going to a foreign government not known for extraterroritorial judicial overreach worse than your data going to your local government for longterm storage and profiling?

What security and privacy concerns the app itself sparks (e.g. just last week the EU institutios banned it for staff), it seems the real power is in the manipulation it provides and how intransparent the process behind is. It is fact that the Chinese government exerts control over tiktok content, and can and does limit or amplify certain content (see e.g. Tibet, Tiananmen, Hongkong or Xinjiang beyond basic "we appreciate diverse culture" messaging and you will find nothing critical or factual even on the non-chinese tiktok).

The information wars are on and this leads to many things like anti refugee, Muslim or jew sentiments, or anti vaccine propaganda in Europe and racial and political divisions in the U.S. - all to drive a wedge. Tiktok is a powerful tool used by the most vulnerable and most influential population - teens and young adults.

I don't know which of the two is worse in terms of what they do with the data once they have it, but one big difference is that Tiktok is much easier to avoid than google. I just don't use Tiktok anyways. For google, it's not that easy: The thing is: Google is not just Google the search engine, but also a huge zoo of other sites and services used not directly by you but indirectly via a big part of internet sites out there, often in a way that is required for the site to work.

In other words: even if you don't use Google yourself, you still have to worry about their tracking and fingerprinting because of stuff that third-party sites use/embed from them. For example: youtube, recaptcha, analytics, web fonts hosting, embedded site search functionalities, google storage, googleapi, and other javascript apis (not all of which being easily recognizeable as belonging to google) etc etc. there are too many to list. In other words: they have their tracking embedded pretty much everywhere in third party sites.

Some of that is easily blockable e.g. with ublock origin and uMatrix… other stuff not so much, and it's a constant game of whack-a-mole: they constantly acquire new companies providing services or APIs popular among web sites, so as to use that to better track you

I consider them equals where general collection is concerned. In terms of the scale and reach, Google is a bigger offender (possibly the biggest) in my personal life.

I consider them equally greedy in term of data collection and tracking.

But if I have to choose, I prefer giving away my data to China than the US. I consider China to be a bit less hostile